Find The Outside

In episode four of season two, Tim and Tuesday explore the nature of moving from a start-up mindset to next-phase growth. As enthusiastic prototypers and experimenters, how do we know one phase is done and it’s time to capture learning and institutionalize? When do we call it, and how do we grow?

Together, Tim Merry and Tuesday Ryan-Hart are THE OUTSIDE—systems change and equity facilitators who bring the fresh air necessary to organize movements, organizations, and collaborators forward for progress, surfacing new mindsets for greater participation and shared impact.

• Tues: We started The Outside eighteen months ago with the goal to experiment for two years to see what would happen.
• Tim: One experiment is done and the next one begins—an increase in scale, sophistication, breadth of relationships drawn into do the work. Now, we want to start building infrastructure that’s an investment into the next five years.
• Tues: A big part of the experiment: could we build our work around systems change with equity at the centre?
• Tim: We’ve received a lot of feedback over the years as to the potency of that [our] partnership. We wanted to take this to another level—a deeper commitment to one another and to the learning between us.
• Tim: We have three long-term, systems change efforts that are in different stages. We’ve realized that The Outside is with clients for a period of 2-5 years. We’re there to help things to get unstuck, lifted and moving.
• Tues: We don’t parachute in… but it’s not a long-term thing. Our role is to help you get unstuck, get things moving and build a capacity. This is what we’ve learned. We did not know this 18 months ago.
• Tim: We’re trying to build an ecosystem of different apps and practices that enable us to function effectively as an organization. We are working with a tool called monday.com which allows us to list all of our activities, track movement, have conversation, give each other feedback, attach documents and links. It’s basically a project management tool for across the organization. We also use whatsapp.com, slack.com and zoom.com. This is the infrastructure of how we function. On another level, we use programs like waveapps.com and xero.com to get a financial overview of how the organization is evolving.

Song: Stay High by Brittany Howard

Poem: Time to awaken, an original by Tim Merry (one of the first poems Tim performed!)

We all be learners and teachers

We don't need no preachers

To find the whole

soul

force

Of course!

It is like riding a horse

remaining in the saddle

even when up shit creek without a paddle.

Be yourself

Everyone else is taken

No point fakin

The only person you're foolin is youself

You already got all the wealth

Don't need to search no more

Knocking door to door

Cause its all in the place you was born in

No more stallin'

Listen loudly to the callin'

Why you here?

It ain't nothing to do with fear

That much is clear.

I must confess

my greatest fear was success

Daring to shine bright

Get into the line of sight

Stepping into the spotlight.

I trained for years

To be on stage and hide my fears

In the character of another

Always under cover

Never truly the deeper me

Time to see

Be free

Be

Now

Fear no more

I am sure

I have felt the

Whole

Soul Force

Course

Through my veins

I know what it means to be sane

Living in partnership with my brain

My body and blood

And the un-nameable flood

Of realisation

Be Self

Everyone else is taken

It is time to awaken.

Are you stirred and shakin'?

Are you quakin'?

If not why not?

Take a look around

The world is calling to become profound

The messages loud and clear

Drop the fear

The time is now

The place is here.

It always the occasion

Don't get lost in the alien invasion

Take action

to let go of distraction

Feel the heart

In the breath of the now

Kaboom kapow

Like a hit on head

Sit up in bed

The nightmare is over

You just found the four leaf clover

Ego move over

I am getting on my horse

The whole

Soul

force of course!

No more fakin'

be Self

everyone else is taken

It's time to

Awaken.

Subscribe to the podcast now—in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or anywhere else you find podcasts. New episodes will be available every second Tuesday. If you’d like to get in touch with us about something you heard on the show, reach us at [email protected]. 

Find the song we played in today’s show—and every song we’ve played in previous shows—on the playlist. Just search ‘Find the Outside’ on Spotify.

Duration: 29:07

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

Episode cover image: source

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode three of season two, Tim and Tuesday explore the often talked-about, always sought-for, and ultimately elusive ideal of balance. In our journeys to reach ‘success’ — to have the greatest possible impact for a better tomorrow — what can we bring to our daily life to protect and renew our energies today?

Together, Tim Merry and Tuesday Ryan-Hart are THE OUTSIDE—systems change and equity facilitators who bring the fresh air necessary to organize movements, organizations, and collaborators forward for progress, surfacing new mindsets for greater participation and shared impact.

• Tues: I used to have a boss that would say she hated the word ‘balance’. She would say working moms were always going to drop balls, just make sure that one of the balls you drop is not your children. But sometimes you do. Just be human; sometimes you are going to drop all your balls.
• Tim: Family and care for family is a core principal of how we work together. It’s a non-negotiable.
• Tues: Have we equated balance with equal or equilibrium? Balance as a moving target is where we get the heartache.
• Tim: I’m not sure balance can be achieved without some kind of pivot point for things to move from.
• Tues: You could just unintentionally move through your life and get to your grave and say, “oh, is that how I spent my time/is that what I did? There is something around intention that at least naming what’s important that makes giving our attention so much more possible.
• Tues: While we may not ever reach this enlightened state of balance; we do know when we are out of balance.
• Tim: When we do our work, we talk about the need of striking a balance between just enough order so things can evolve effectively and enough chaos so that we are learning. It’s the whole Dee Hock work around the Chaordic Path.
• Tim: Just picking up some things here: 1. Clarity & Intention; and 2. Being in-tune with your inner guidance system. My hunger and thirst for balance is heightened by what I am experiencing in the world around me.
• Tues: I wonder if we are talking about two different things? Balance for me is where I put my attention, energy, action and time; it’s not that place of stillness where I think it’s okay. They are two distinct things for me.
• Tues: It’s hard to articulate because some of those pressures/expectations are so unspoken for women. The root of this word [balance] has to do with equity. Our experiences of balance are deeply impacted by our social position.
• Tues: Those of us who are targets of oppression probably get a really good sensitivity to that and see it more easily and more clearly and those of us who would benefit from an imbalance of equity clobber those feelings down.
• Tim: As a result of my class, family, access to wealth, nationality, race… I feel like from a pretty early age I was witness to a whole series of injustices [familial] and they increased in intensity into my teens. That’s a construct, in my life, of the education of the privileged classes. Through it all, I still knew what was just and what was not. For me, I knew what was right and wrong through my entire childhood. I really fought to protect this as a young man.
• Tues: We are typically really reinforced for not holding onto it [empathy]. I think it’s why people trust you with this equity work. You keep that awareness in your bones and it makes you trustworthy. Trauma tries to extinguish empathy. It’s about intention. We need to have an intention of being willing to see the pain in others.
• Tim: I want to acknowledge that there are people within the ruling classes, that recurrently over history, who have maintained that sense of justice despite the context they were raised in.
• Tues: Two important stances we bring to our work: when we are working with groups of people carrying this acknowledgement around the pain of injustice and lack of equity and that people have will and are working toward ending it feels like two important stances that we bring into our work. 

Song: “Motion Sickness” by Phoebe Bridgers

Poem: “Big Brown Dog” by John Fisher-Merritt, Organic Farmer & Poet

On Winter mornings I know

When my man is preparing to go outside.

He reaches into the closet for his coveralls.

I approach him eagerly, wagging my

Best tail wags, oblivious to tail pain as

I whack chair,

desk and closet door

You see

I have trained this wonderful

Smelling man

To throw his coveralls

Over my head,

And speak to me in an

Affectionate tone of voice as I

Revel in the ambrosial scent

Of his body odor.

Subscribe to the podcast now—in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or anywhere else you find podcasts. New episodes will be available every second Tuesday. If you’d like to get in touch with us about something you heard on the show, reach us at [email protected]. 

Find the song we played in today’s show—and every song we’ve played in previous shows—on the playlist. Just search ‘Find the Outside’ on Spotify.

Duration: 40:51

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

Episode cover image: source

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For episode two of season two, Tim and Tuesday interview Jacob Watkins of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in Zürich, Switzerland. Collaborating with The Outside over the last nine months for the International Committee of the Red Cross, Jacob has brought remarkably point of view on how change happens, resulting in an incredibly rich field of learning between what might have once been thought of as an unlikely trio.

Together, Tim Merry and Tuesday Ryan-Hart are THE OUTSIDE—systems change and equity facilitators who bring the fresh air necessary to organize movements, organizations, and collaborators forward for progress, surfacing new mindsets for greater participation and shared impact.

• Tues: Jacob is one of the people we are learning with. It’s got us jazzed and excited. Feel like you [Jacob] keep us right on an edge.
• Jacob: It was a really interesting experience to be in our pitch with a client and be asked the question “would you be up for working with another consultancy on this project?” To be knowledgeable, subject matter people in these topics to then have this question asked… I was kind of intrigued and cautiously optimistic.
• Tim: In one of our early meetings, you named us as people who bring expertise, process and skill around systems change and what you, particularly, and PwC was bringing into the game was the ability for analysis and organizational assessment and an analytical approach.
• Tues: This was brave - you made a clear discernment. The client chose to work with both of us. Give them a lot of credit for trying something different.
• Jacob: What was cool, on both sides, was an openness to try to get under the skin of what is systems thinking.
• Jacob: I worked in the money market straight out of university. Making money and earning commission and trading was not enough intellectually for me or a meaningful change made. Had an early mid-life crisis — felt grumpy and bored. I was inspired by Tim Ferriss of The 4-Hour Workweek and other folks putting out different ways of thinking. Did a tech start-up and worked with a team that melded together and formed this incredible group. It was the learning journey that got me really excited. In my role with PwC, I am never bored and get to tackle really difficult problems. When I was in that room with you guys, I was thinking how cool it would be to figure out how to make this work. How could we bridge the seeming gap between our two worlds and that seemed like a problem worthy of attention, time and energy.
• Tim: What is distinct about PwC and Jacob Watkins and The Outside and Tim Merry & Tuesday Ryan-Hart? What’s the divide?
• Jacob: (1) I think if I can manage my PwC colleagues to keep an open mind around this, I think we can get to a meeting of the minds; and (2) We spoke with different business language. Process for you, means something different for me.
• Tues: In some ways, we wanted a lot of the same ends but our ways of going about them were completely different (i.e. data analysis vs developmental evaluation). To me, the data piece is where things come together quite beautifully. The data each of us got overlapped — it wasn’t in any way in conflict with each other. That 10% that was different was quite important!
• Tim: Often the particular worldviews that our two different organizations are coming from, but also we as individuals arrived into this initiative with one another, sets us up as adversaries where one has to win for there to be true progress of the human species or true progress for systems change or true progress for organizational development. … One of the real beauties of this particular initiative is in a very fundamental way we’ve been modelling the practice we’ve been inviting people into and in a very visible way.
• Jacob: The challenge that I faced in my career, particularly in working with clients when it comes to big-four consulting or strategy house consulting, is you're kind of hired with this underlying assumption that you will have a very clear, mechanical approach, that you will be able to deduce insights that they weren’t already aware of and that you can give answers to the organization that they can take forward… that’s kind of the more traditional consulting USP (Unique Selling Proposition) for the big firms. Traditionally, that is what the market and buyers have wanted but more and more I am seeing a shift, particularly through digital disruption, to new ways of working that challenge the older consulting models.
• Jacob: The more we can bring our world and your world together, for lack of better words, the greater the innovation and the greater the power of moving forward is going to be.
• Tues: 100%! Gives us a chance to live our rhetoric. We came up with the conception of a new Operating System together. That was definitely more of a sum of the parts. It results in better work - we developed something that did not exist in the world before.
• Tim: There are many people who will say that we [Tim & Tuesday] “sold out” by agreeing to work with an organization like PwC. Yet, what we are discovering is quite the opposite - it’s made our work better, it’s increased our capacity to serve the people we are working for.
• Tim: I’m proud of what we’ve done together, both of the work itself and the breaking down of barriers in our own worldviews and between our own organizations. Our client has talked about the Operating System we developed as “groundbreaking.” I would also say that our combined approach has also been groundbreaking.

Poem: “Whereas: An Excerpt” by Layli Long Soldier

WHEREAS I heard a noise I thought was a sneeze. At the breakfast table pushing eggs around my plate I wondered if he liked my cooking, thought about what to talk about. He pinched his fingers to the bridge of his nose, squeezed his eyes. He wiped. I often say he was a terrible drinker when I was a child I’m not afraid to say it because he’s different now: sober, attentive, showered, eating. But in my childhood when things were different I rolled onto my side, my hands together as if to pray, locked between knees. When things were different I lay there for long hours, my face to the wall, blank. My eyes left me, my soldiers, my two scouts to the unseen. And because language is the immaterial I never could speak about the missing so perhaps I cried for the invisible, what I could not see, doubly. What is it to wish for the absence of nothing? There at the breakfast table as an adult, wondering what to talk about if he liked my cooking, pushing the invisible to the plate’s edge I looked up to see he hadn’t sneezed, he was crying. I’d never heard him cry, didn’t recognize the symptoms. I turned to him when I heard him say I’m sorry I wasn’t there sorry for many things / like that / curative voicing / an opened bundle / or medicine / or birthday wishing / my hand to his shoulder / it’s okay I said it’s over now I meant it / because of our faces blankly / because of a lifelong stare down / because of centuries in sorry

Song: “In Gold” by Submotion Orchestra

Subscribe to the podcast now—in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or anywhere else you find podcasts. New episodes will be available every second Tuesday. If you’d like to get in touch with us about something you heard on the show, reach us at [email protected]. 

Find the song we played in today’s show—and every song we’ve played in previous shows—on the playlist. Just search ‘Find the Outside’ on Spotify.

Duration: 41:02

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

Episode cover image: source

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the first episode of season two, Tim and Tuesday explore one of the most prescient requirements of equitable change: the generosity necessary to successfully work through difference. How can we draw out and celebrate such a critical ingredient when that ingredient cannot be forced, but earned?

• Tim: Generosity is one of the core principals of The Outside. It’s how we turn up in our work, our lives and with each other. The overflowing cup of generosity. We are dealing with really tough issues, yet at the same time, there is an incredible humanity turning up in the room as well as professionalism.
• Tues: When we talk about difference, traditionally, people often contract. This is the exact opposite of it. It’s a heart expansion piece. I am generous because the opportunity is there and I am willing to step into it. It connects us. It feels like a key piece of working in equity and difference is generosity; although you can’t demand it.
• Tues: Appreciation & Generosity: Wondering what is the role of appreciating that is one of those conditions that supports generosity? The expression of appreciation is part of generosity.
• Tues: Wondering about the role of generosity in power and privilege… sometimes I find that those in power are less appreciative and have less generosity. Is this true? Let’s talk about it.
• Tim: I feel like there is a connection between empathy and generosity [to give, to share]. What I know from my own life and upbringing is that a lot of circumstances of wealth and privilege led towards having a significant empathy deficit / a significant lack of ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand that.
• Tim: Many of the systems we are working with are designed for siloed, fragmented thinking. A huge piece of our work is about overcoming that. This generosity thing we are talking about is like a backdoor to defragmentation.
• Tues: Often in rooms when people are brought together, the thinking is that when ‘this’ or ‘that’ happens, then we can be generous. There are often pre-conditions for when we can be generous with one another. We don’t have to wait one moment. There does not have to be the perfect conditions to be generous with one another. We can just start. The backdoor is always open.
• Tim: What I am loving here is how subversive generosity is to the dominant cultures and structures of decision making. How subversive this can be to the psychology and mindset many of our senior leaders are in. Generosity can invite our senior leaders into working in a different way.
• Tim: This principal of generosity, particularly in the two really large systems change efforts we are involved in right now in the US and Europe, it has permeated, not just the work and our team, but the contracting. It’s permeated the toughest conversations around contracting which is money and intellectual property. It’s quite remarkable. Generosity can extend into some of the most transactional spaces.

Poem: “blessing the boats” by Lucille Clifton (1936-2010)

may the tide

that is entering even now

the lip of our understanding

carry you out

beyond the face of fear

may you kiss

the wind then turn from it

certain that it will

love your back may you

open your eyes to water

water waving forever

and may you in your innocence

sail through this to that

Song: “Balade brésilienne (feat. Flavia Coelho)” - Gaël Faye - Des fleurs - EP

Subscribe to the podcast now—in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or anywhere else you find podcasts. New episodes will be available every second Tuesday. If you’d like to get in touch with us about something you heard on the show, reach us at [email protected]. 

Find the song we played in today’s show—and every song we’ve played in previous shows—on the playlist. Just search ‘Find the Outside’ on Spotify.

Duration: 34:41

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

Episode cover image: source

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In season one’s final episode, Tim and Tuesday wrap a year of incredible conversations with a summer assignment: how do we cultivate readiness? Along the road as systems change facilitators, we wonder: are we really doing what we set out to do? And how can we find fertile and steady ground in emergent work?

Tues: This is our Season Finale episode!

Tim: The number of people listening has been steadily increasing. I know there are groups listening together. I love the honour and opportunity we’ve had in being in people’s lives. It makes me really happy.

Tim: The Outside has exploded. It’s busy and we are still trying to figure out how to deal with that because we did not expect it to grow this fast, this soon. And so, the podcast has become a space to stop, reflect, think bigger, reconnect around the work, challenge each other.

Tim: Looking back on our year, what is important to leave with our podcast listeners?

Tues: Two things: (1) Work-wise, one of our learnings is that systems change, with equity at the centre, takes a long time to really catch. It can be years into an effort before those pieces really come together. (2) Personal: Keep learning and understanding and moving from your centre. If you do nothing else this summer, except discover more about yourself, you will have done some pretty amazing work and some pretty amazing work in the world.

Tim: My personal practice of meditation, of spending time in nature, of being in therapy that allows me to revisit things in my childhood that set fundamental patterns for my behaviour… there’s something in all of that which is about letting go of who I think I am, what I think I am, what I think my work is.

Tim: Accessing “readiness” is one of the things I want to start exploring. How to we map the stages of this [client’s] journey over multiple years. When I was in my early 20’s coaching with Meg Wheatley, she used to talk about ‘one step at a time leadership.’ Stop, Re-orient, Re-organize, Move.

Tim: My wife and I choose a word or a sentence that sets a tone for the year. The one we landed on for 2019 was ‘balance’. What is the balance I want in my life? Inviting everyone into this — how are we giving all parts of ourselves what we need?

Tues: Next season, we’ll interview Jacob Watkins, Trupti Sarode & Gabrielle Donnelly about co-existence of data and analysis. We’ll speak with Alastair Jarvis about Two Loops of Systems Change. We’ll explore balance, and continue to share what we’re learning about equity and systems change. We’ll also feature Ole Qvist-Sørensen from Bigger Picture, around visualizing shifted futures.

Tues: We will be back next fall (Date: TBC)! In the meantime, please revisit season one, and share and subscribe!

Poem: “Find a Point on the Wall” by our friend, Lex Schroeder

Find a Point on the Wall

try holding your leg out straight from your hip

turn out

bend, and dip

point

now hold it straight out

be long

where's your core

point

turn out

bend

now hold it straight out

grow taller

take it to the side

higher

back

we’ll do 8

take it up now

ball of the foot

turn around

higher

grow 5 inches more

arms up

turn

kick it out

try not to collapse into your standing leg

where’s your core

good

now try letting your friends feel pain

let them live with a steady ache

let them bring themselves back from the dead

let your loved ones grow older

keep going, let people get sick

let someone worry about you

try laughing during a nuclear war

let beauty wash over you

feel loved, try to love somebody well

take up a bit more space, back up

we’ll do 3 sets of 8

soften

higher

let it be bigger than you

grow 5 inches

say it straight out

don't rush these

forget yourself

try practicing grace

let your heart break for the world

try crying after a dry spell

root into the ground

soften

now stay long

we’ll do 3 more sets

Occupy

and back

back

just 2 more

where’s your chest

don’t scrunch

grow taller

make more space

it's ok, be exhausted

let it be easy

look up

Hello!

relax into the breath

find your core

there

Song: “Incapable” by Róisín Murphy

Subscribe to the podcast now—in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or anywhere else you find podcasts. New episodes will be available every second Tuesday. If you’d like to get in touch with us about something you heard on the show, reach us at [email protected].

Find the song we played in today’s show—and every song we’ve played in previous shows—on the playlist. Just search ‘Find the Outside’ on Spotify.

Duration: 33:28

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

Episode cover image: source

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode twenty, Tim and Tuesday dig into the substance of change—how to cultivate the kind of big-picture view that validates a good forward path.

• Tim: We’ve been learning a lot about data, particularly over the last 12 months, as we work with major initiatives that bring in large consultancy firms who are generating data for us. There’s a real opportunity to combine the process expertise that we bring in with the data and analysis that comes out of evaluation work to support really powerful interventions in very large systems.
• Tues: There’s a really honest reaction to deductive reasoning that so often accompanies data capture. It is a legitimate reaction but for us as we get into bigger and bigger systems change, where data is simply part of the environment, we had to figure out how we would work with it and use it. We’ve been learning about marrying these two different streams (narrative and data). 
• Tim: Because people think data has the answer, there can be a misconception that if we do really good data analysis we are going to know what to do. In our experience, the more data analysis we do, the better informed your decisions are but they are not easier to make. 
• Tues: The request for data, or more data, is often a block to get to work. But good data pushes you further into inquiry and allows you to meet the system where they are.
• Tim: To provoke, exhilarate and inform where we take action.
• Tues: Developmental Evaluation moves beyond summative evaluation as it supports a shift in mindset towards experimentation, learning as you go, to iterate.
• Tues: Summative and Developmental Evaluation walk together quite well. It’s not a good or bad, an either/or, it’s a both/and. They need to be aligned and work together.
• Tim: The Hunger Project that Tues worked on is an incredible summary of multiple iterations into a highly complex intervention into food systems.
• Tues: Developmental Evaluation provides us with a much fuller way to support these processes and support the leaders that allow them to try something new.
• Tim: If data is shared and evolving overtime could it become a ‘shared currency’ — could it unite us in a fragmented system that is struggling to meet the needs of the people it is trying to serve?

Poem: “Endymion, Book I” by John Keats

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing

A flowery band to bind us to the earth,

Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth

Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,

Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways

Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall

From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,

Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon

For simple sheep; and such are daffodils

With the green world they live in; and clear rills

That for themselves a cooling covert make

'Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,

Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:

And such too is the grandeur of the dooms

We have imagined for the mighty dead;

All lovely tales that we have heard or read:

An endless fountain of immortal drink,

Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.

(continue reading here)

Song: “Happy Birthday” by Stevie Wonder

Duration: 34:06

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

Episode cover image: source

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode nineteen, Tim and Tuesday tell the story of an improvised process in the middle of a three-day session. As facilitators, how can we orchestrate memorable, game-changing breakthroughs or surges ahead in understanding?

• Tues: Today we’ve got a story to share from the middle of a three-day strategic event. Things had shifted and we discovered that the needs were different. The day before we had gotten a lot of information in and we needed to turn the corner into developing strategy. We were missing depth. It was time to shake things up.
• Tim: I tend toward strategy. I had a gut feeling that if we went straight into strategy we would replicate what we heard the day before. Needed to make it human and ‘felt’ in the room. So much of our lead up to this retreat was around beliefs. We need to deal with some of the fundamental beliefs that underpin the current system and tackle them. If not, it’s highly likely that we are going to replicate the very things we are trying to change. 
• Tues: A depth of feeling was in the room but no collective sense of depth. And we were looking at a group of folks who had very deep, structural divisions within them. To move to strategy would have kept us in our camps. 
• Tim: Idea of a fish bowl — it would enable people to witness each other from the different perspectives they were bringing in from the different parts of the system and then we began to think about working with that structure. 
• Tues: I’d previously used fish bowls in anti-racism / anti-sexism work. They can bring perspective that you don’t hear often, however in North America it can really entrench people back into how they know how to talk about their experience. We asked them to speak from themselves and brought a different kind of question to fish bowl.
• Tues: Physical set-up of fish bowl is a group of people in a circle in the centre and a second outer circle of people. For those of us in the centre, we were the circle. The conversation was only in the inner circle.
• Tim: Part of working with groups is the ability to be strategic and being able to be tuned into the individual and people in the room and another bit that is energetic. 
• Tim: Experience of holding the outer circle — if felt important for me to be incredibly grounded so I would close my eyes for long periods of time and open them for long periods of time. Very deliberate entering and grounding of myself in the room. The other thing that happened as I was sitting there I was getting a lot of really intense visual images with water. It was an important experience for me as a host.
• Tues: We did the circle three times — started with the medium power group, least amount of power group and ended with the group with the most amount of power. In every group there was something incredibly moving. In the second group (least amount of power) at one point someone said “I think this group has the most pain” and that was a really important moment as it threatened to bring us back into ourselves and our typical divisions. So I stepped in and said there is a lot of pain in this circle and there was a lot of pain in the first circle as well. It allowed the whole group to feel the wholeness and reject fragmentation. Then at the end of that group, I had the inner circle stand up and face the outer circle and said “when we talk about these people” we are no longer talking in abstraction, we are talking about each other (these people) in this room. It was another moment of re-knitting into our wholeness. 
• Tim: This process led us into a completely different quality of depth.
• Tues: Depth and strategy are inextricable.

Poem: The Travelling Onion by Naomi Shihab Nye

When I think how far the onion has traveled

just to enter my stew today, I could kneel and praise

all small forgotten miracles,

crackly paper peeling on the drainboard,

pearly layers in smooth agreement,

the way the knife enters onion

and onion falls apart on the chopping block,

a history revealed.

And I would never scold the onion

for causing tears. It is right that tears fall

for something small and forgotten.

How at meal, we sit to eat,

commenting on texture of meat or herbal aroma

but never on the translucence of onion,

now limp, now divided,

or its traditionally honorable career:

For the sake of others, disappear.

Song: Waterfall by The Stone Roses

Duration: 40:50

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

Episode cover image: source

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode eighteen, Tim and Tuesday explore how we work with distributed teams: as ‘managers of one’, how can we keep a strong connection? How can we navigate highly complex issues and change processes of a rapidly-growing and remote business?

• Tues: Managers of one are often used to going off and doing their own thing. I am very accustomed to managing and navigating on my own, so the added dimension of additional people adds a wrinkle: how to keep everyone connected and intersecting, both strategically and tactically?
• Tim: One of the great benefits of working with a team is that we get to see a bigger picture we couldn’t see otherwise, allowing for strategic direction and prioritization. As a naturally productive person, there is a piece of me that measures myself relative to my production rather than relative to my connection.
• Tues: The benefit of a team can allow us to hold production and connection but can also be a challenge.
• Tim: Inherent to teams can be the connection you build. There’s something about our team for the ability to be really human with each other and practical, get shit done.
• Tues: Worth being quite vigilant to connection as we can tilt to one side which is production. Really loving using WhatsApp with our team—a living, breathing space for us to connect with each other.
• Tim: The focus of our work / approach and theory to change is that we put Shared Work in the middle. I wonder if that also leads to the tendency to put the work over relationships? We also both come from a highly relational field so maybe we take it for granted?
• Tues: Because we put work in the centre, does that pull us in a direction? Could be a danger to this work. All of the stances around it are relational. How do we live our rhetoric? Being in relationship, staying in connection, taking care of each other—all of that feeds our results and moves the work into the centre.
• Tim: Shared Work is the compelling centre that has the gravitational pull to attract ideas, people, resources. The thing everything begins to orbit around. The stances or principals of these agreements become the container. This is Art of Hosting 101.
• Tim: We’re finding with our clients that we are constantly negotiating between our dearest-held beliefs about the work and our circumstances. It’s a tango. That’s happening in our teams as well. If we don’t meet regularly as a team, people start to feel fragmented and disconnected.
• Tues: There’s a sense of belonging to team and the work and that we are not alone in it. What does power have to do with that? How do power and belonging knit together? Do those of us with more power have a responsibility to create places and spaces for people to belong?
• Tim: We also need places of belonging. I want my teams to feel like a fun place to be and I want to create that for others. But it’s not about connection for the sake of connection. This is about creating places of belonging both for ourselves and for the teams we bring together.

Poem: “Green Gulch Farm” by Stephanie Kaza

We live by the sun, We feel by the moon, We move by the stars,

We live in all things, All things live in us,

We eat from the earth, We drink from the rain, We breathe of the air,

We live in all things, All things live in us,

We call to each other, We listen to each other, Our hearts deepen with love and compassion,

We live in all things, All things live in us,

We depend on the trees and animals, We depend on the earth, Our minds open with wisdom and insight,

We live in all things, All things live in us,

We dedicated our practice to others, We include all forms of life, We celebrate the joy of living-dying,

We live in all things, All things live in us,

We are full of life, We are full of death, We are grateful for all beings and companions.

Song: Pumped Up Kicks by Foster The People

Duration: 34:49

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

Episode cover image: source

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode seventeen, Tim & Tuesday talk about being clear versus having a feeling of clarity - even through confusion. How can we train ourselves to stay open and keep moving forward in rooms electric with uncertainty?

• Tim: How do I hold my own centre and clarity the midst of it all? How not to get caught up in it or lost in it. Brings us back to personal practice. Keeps coming up again and again.
• Tues: Personal practice is key to navigate both the clarity and uncertainty. 
• Tim: The difference between my brain feeling clear and having a feeling of clarity even though I’m incredibly confused. How can we train ourselves to sit in rooms where all of that is happening?
• Tues: Sinking down below some of thoughts into something different and that place is always quiet, still and settled when I get there. Meditation has given me this.
• Tim: Personal training directly translates into the ability to work in diverse rooms. Some of the best training in this work is being able to go inside and sit with that kind of inherent confusion of being a human being without freaking out.
• Tues: Is that maybe why we cling to models so tightly so we don’t have to enter into that confusion?
• Tim: Beyond self-care, personal practice is one of the things that bring you home to yourself. We all have personal practices available to us. When you choose to step into a world of action and change-making, that is inherently unpredictable, suddenly what is a personal practice for you needs to become a disciple that enables you to do the work.
• Tues: It’s about turning it on and bringing intention to it / see it as such. There can be a million ways to do it. What is accessible to you now?
• Tim: What if personal practice was integrated into our idea of what it means to be a parent, a friend, a son, a coach, a leader in my faith community? What if the idea of personal practice was fundamentally connected to our understanding of what it means to be a leader / professional
• Tues: There is some healing, cleansing, knowing, understanding, amazing thing that can happen in personal practice.

• Song: “River” by Ibeyi
• Poem: “Radical empathy” by Kate Tempest

Duration: 43:05

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

Episode cover image: source

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode sixteen, Tim and Tuesday speak with change makers at Forward Malmö, a movement uniting for multi-sector, multi-stakeholder change. How can we best share the work on shared problems?

A conversation with Joel Veborg and Rodolfo Zuniga of Save The Children and Sabina Dethorey from the City of Malmö. Forward Malmö is a movement that brings together a number of organizations with shared and overlapping mandates to multi-sector, multi-stakeholder change. How can we best convene to change the conditions that impact shared problems?

• Tues: We’ve been working with these three on an initiative/movement called Forward Malmö for about a year now. It was initiated by Save the Children (develop a systemic view of how to change the conditions that impact children), but pretty quickly it became apparent that we needed a multi-stakeholder/sector response to what is happening to children.
• Tim: The City of Malmö is dealing with a 30% child poverty rate. There are massive amounts of upheaval and uncertainty in Malmö. We are hoping to do something that impacts things nationally, pointing to the future of Sweden as a whole.
• Rodolfo: Save the Children - Sweden will be a 100-year organization soon. We are taking a big step to become part of a solution (i.e. migration crisis in 2015). The big eureka for us was that we cannot do it alone. That’s when we contacted The Outside.
• Joel: We found different people that understood us and wanted to figure things out with us. 
• Sabina: Malmö is prepared for this because we’ve been working together with NGOs and other stakeholders for quite some time. Malmö has been a city of change for the last two decades. We are used to developing when in-crisis. This last decade was focused on social sustainability. For me, this initiative feels like home. This is the right way to work. 
• Tim: What’s amazing to me is that people, in fundamentally different sectors, are having the same realization and somehow finding each other to do this work of transformation.
• Joel: This is true as we’ve been searching for answers outside of our organization—lots of conversations over many years. The private sector is new to us.
• Tues: There is some momentum that is attracting the private sector to Forward Malmö. 
• Tim: The quality of relationship-building and care for each other creates fertile ground for our work to turn up and have a proper impact.
• Rodolfo: The invitation to our workshop [and this work] was built upon the relationship and trust from invitees. We are designing a long conversation here where we will see a lot of outputs and outcomes. This is imprinted in the cultural DNA of Swedes. When there is a problem, we gather and try to build a solution. 
• Sabina: What I learned from the NGO I started was believing in yourself. We had people with power telling us ‘that won’t work / you won’t succeed’.
• Tim: We’ve decided to acknowledge that this is long-term work. It’s about connecting action so that we have a leadership cohort to carry us into the future. Just this change of narrative has attracted people to us.
• Joel: Think this is brilliant! People need this fragmented space to see and think.
• Rodolfo: We saw that there was a clear need for leadership and capacity-building.
• Sabina: During the last year, others also identified leadership as a crucial thing to work with. The Malmö Commission final report also pointed to this. Need to work with it in so many layers. This could really have an impact on our future work.
• Tim: People believe in the “how” even though they don’t know the destination. We are going to figure it out together and that’s what makes it trustworthy. It’s simple, but it’s powerful.

Poem: Sabina shared a Swedish poem—we’ll upload the English version as soon as we have our hands on it.

Song (Joel): “The Weight” (“The Last Waltz” LIVE version) by The Band

Subscribe to the podcast now—in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or anywhere else you find podcasts. New episodes will be available every second Tuesday. If you’d like to get in touch with us about something you heard on the show, reach us at [email protected].

Find the song we played in today’s show—and every song we’ve played in previous shows—on the playlist. Just search ‘Find the Outside’ on Spotify.

Duration: 44:57

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

Episode cover image: source



Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.